Hello,
I'm a History major with a concentration in United States History. I saw an advisor last week, and credit to him he told me the field is going to get worse before it gets better. He gave me a lot of practical advice to think about, and told me the field is like a pyramid shape. He also told me it's not enough to be good you need to be great.
That's fine. I have exceedingly high expectations and standards for myself.
My interest primarily lies in writing - books or research perhaps, so how difficult is the field exactly? Thank you for your time.
Come on people, there must be more to say on this!
The most obvious step would be to become a university academic. As a rough rule of thumb about the chances of becoming an academic, look around at the other students in your history courses. How many would like to become an academic, do some research, write books etc? Now look at how many of the staff are retiring this year. I think you will find that rather more people would like to enter the profession than are needed to replace the ones who are leaving. Yes, you may be good, and you may be lucky, but you should probably keep an eye on other ways to use your talents. Obviously the number of university posts may change -- but not necessarily in your favour as more teaching goes online.
In many universities there is remarkably little contact between undergraduate students and post-graduate students. As getting at least a master's is almost certainly your most sensible first step wherever you may then go, it might be a good idea to try and persuade your department to organise an event where you can meet the post-grads and maybe get a little mentoring. If the department are not interested, you and a group of like-minded friends could try luring a few post-grads to lunch with you or something. You can learn how their future looks to them.
What alternative routes are there to where you want to go? You could maybe aim at a writing career, specialising in History. One of the things you will learn on writing courses is how few people find they can support themselves on writing books alone. You will need to look at how you can earn your basic bread and butter.
A third route is to become a school teacher. That takes courage, and making a successful second career of research and writing while teaching takes self-discipline. But it is do-able, especially if you are prepared to take a long view -- if you acquire a spouse and family the second career might have to survive on very limited hours for a while.
So now we are down to the more bitty possibilities -- looking at other sorts of posts for historians. Obviously many of these do include research as part of the reason why they need a professional. It may be possible to grow and stretch you job description to include more of the activities you would like, or it may be that some of research and all the writing will again have to done by moonlighting. It is interesting (and possibly significant) that nobody from this group has replied to your post, when they might have thought its advantages needed advertising in a way that the more obvious routes don't.
tl;dr It is possible. It isn't easy.
Good luck with it! I think this is one of the many situations in life where you can make any of the possible options turn out well -- just follow through on your decision with energy, enthusiasm and lots of hard work.